This blog is going to have surfing, snowboarding, tech stuff and maybe some 'meaning of life' stuff if I'm feeling particularly stoked.

Monday, May 16, 2005

Dogtown

Outbound:
Route 44: 6:48 Wallingford to Montlake Freeway Station
Route 242: 7:13 Montlake to Overlake

Reading: Faster Than The Speed Of Light, Joao Magueijo
Listening: Collateral Soundtrack

With the current appetite for all things extreme and even better, extreme and retro, there will undoubtedly be a lot of hype around the new movie "Lords of Dogtown" which is due for release here next month. This is a dramatisation based around the skaters of the pioneering Zephyr skate team, a bunch of hard-core surfers who essentially changed the skating landscape from the teeny-bopper, gold-lame short-wearing American "craze" it was back in the seventies to the extreme sport - alternative lifestyle it is today. The group were essentially a local surf crew who brought their surf moves to the concrete when the conditions were blown out and it was this fluid, surf-like style which mainly contributed to the huge shift, along with a fair amount of style and a lot of pool-riding which is still around today in the modern half-pipe.

Anyway, I watched the original documentary on these guys "Dogtown & Z-Boys" and it was superb. It was a glimpse of a time when surfing/skating wasn't a "cool" thing to do, when there was no X-Games, no billion dollar clothing industry and no Kelly Slater / Tony Hawk.

The film interviewed all these guys today, some are still skating, like Tony Alva while some have drifted back into normal lives. Stacy Peralta, was hugely successful behind the scenes, becoming a successful director of skate videos and infact this documentary. And of course there was the most naturally gifted, yet most self-destructive of the bunch, Jay Adams, a kind of Southern Californian bleach blond Alex Higgins, who is currently spending time in a Hawaiian Correctional Facility.

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